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Report: Three years left to recover lost jobs

Keila Torres Ocasio| on September 2, 2014

Connecticut is still three years away from recovering all the jobs lost before the recession, according to The State of Working Connecticut, a report released Tuesday by Connecticut Voices for Children.

Connecticut has only regained 64 percent of the more than 100,000 jobs it lost during the recession, the report showed, citing state Department of Labor data.

According to Connecticut Voices, it lags behind the nation and peer states in its recovery.

"We keep waiting for the economy to turn around in Connecticut, but it's just always surprising that it hasn't yet," said Wade Gibson, director of the Fiscal Policy Center at Connecticut Voices.

The state's unemployment rate, 6.6 percent, roughly matches that of peer states -- Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island -- but it has declined more slowly, according to the report. It is also higher than the national average of 6.2 percent.

And the state had fewer jobs in 2014, at 1,667,400, than it did in 1989, when there were 1,678,900 nonfarm jobs.

But that's turning around more quickly than the report seems to give it credit for, said Joseph Carbone, president and CEO of The Workplace Inc.

Carbone, who had yet to read the full report, said job growth can be seen each month in the state Department of Labor's reports. "If you look at the last six or eight months, we have had growth nearly every month," he said.

Just this June, the state report noted increases in the number of jobs in seven of 11 sectors of the Connecticut economy, he said. "It's not as robust as we would like it to be, but it's steady," Carbone said.

He estimated the state would recover and surpass its pre-recession job levels in two years or less.

Connecticut Voices also said young workers, minorities and those less educated are disproportionately affected because their unemployment rates were already high going into the recession.

"We're seeing more than just a five-year downturn here in Connecticut," Gibson said. "We're looking at a decade or more where Connecticut families have not seen their finances improve."

This, the child advocacy group noted, means that children in those families are also being adversely affected.

In its report, Connecticut Voices provides suggestions for actions the state government can take to move in the right direction, including expanding the earned income tax credit to the full 30 percent of the federal credit -- a move that is already scheduled. "State budgets are uncertain things so we want to make sure the expansion that is scheduled in fact occurs," Gibson said.

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Another proposed change to the tax code is the addition of a tax exemption that would take into consideration the cost of raising children. Connecticut Voices also proposes the expansion of access to high-quality early care and education and high-performing K-12 schools.